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ANHEDONIA REMEDIES!

GET YOUR ANHEDONIA REMEDIES HERE!

if you are lost in the rut, i am begging you to read this essay by Sasha Chapin suggesting what, essentially, my take, are potential jump-starts back into living life in real time. like actually experiencing experiences

do it now! don’t lose months, years, or decades! there is a life beyond doomscrolling, and it’s finite (sorry. sorry. i know okay)

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Everyone warns you agaist going to the supermarket hungry, but nobody tells you about the dangers of going there too full: I do not want any of these things, for I will never require any food again at all!

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Derailing my GM when they try to do a gazebo bit by having my character pipe up "actually, I think that's a rotunda".

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People talk all the time about autistic people not understanding others but there's also the accursed autistic "saying exactly what you wanna say, straight to the point, very little nuance & then people misinterpret it because they assume there's a hidden nonliteral meaning" phenomenon

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Because sometimes we all just need to see a guy head-bump a beautiful Beluga whale

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Noticed concerns from people on Tumblr about how the Leverage Redemption team uses AI, Breanna in particular, and thought this thread with John Rogers would be relevant! (x)

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OOTS 946

How does one decide when to make this sort of reveal and when to keep it hidden?

The surprise vs suspense thing seems relevant here. If it was kept secret longer, it might have been a bigger surprise (although it's a plenty satisfying surprise here, early as it is) but knowing something the team doesn't allows for a great deal of suspense. There's still unknowns: when they're going to find out, what the plan is, what's going to happen.

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OOTS 945

Well, that sure doesn't look good.

I am absolutely perplexed about how this "what's in the rift?" thing is going to work out.

Maybe it sort of shifts? Sometimes order, sometimes chaos?

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OOTS 944 Mm. Indeed.

Dealing with the feelings stuff very efficiently.

And it does rather seem in character that Roy would respond to V's confession with "wow this is so far above my pay grade that I have literally no idea what to do about it, so I'm just going to not. Apart from something relatively vague about how intention matters, I guess?"

I mean, what do you say to something like that? It's too big.

Swearing off magic forever might be a proportionate response, if it weren't for the whole world is in danger thing. Problems. Very convenient for the story though, V deciding to never do anything (magical) again and idk joining some religious order or something would make for a very boring story.

I'd like to think V can be reconciled with their family, but that seems unlikely from every other family dynamic in this story (apart from Haley's I guess, but she didn't really have a falling out with her father, not like this.) And V is not, in fact, currently trying to fix things with their family, which seems pretty relevant. V made a deliberate choice not to. Still not entirely sure what I think about that, or what the narrative wants me to think.

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OOTS 941 Continuity! Not very...load bearing continuity, but it's something.

OOTS 942 ohhh wait, maybe it is loadbearing, that's where (other character) came from, OK.

So easy to miss plot points that only take up a couple pages.

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OOTS 937 This is the start of what I think of as the "new" OOTS. I mean, sure it's a decade old, but ...sigh.

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OOTS 936 Oh, I missed that Haley's drawing that bow with her foot. And she aims it perfectly. Goodness.

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i think i may have accidentally gotten my roommate into petplay

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.

It's also perhaps an interesting contrast that Tarquin keeps trying to, uh, connect with his sons in a way that destabilizes his own group's dynamics and ends with Malack getting killed (and then when he gives up on bringing Nale in he does just fucking stab him in the gut, no "we can go our own separate ways" here) whereas Elan is doing the opposite in both ways. He, at this point, is not chasing after Tarquin either as a supplicant or as someone who thinks he can force Tarquin to change, and he's not responding to rejection with murder. (Which, I mean, murder was an option. Possibly justifiable. He is a tyrant. But I suppose they're being responsable about things and recognizing that leaving a power vacuum isn't automatically going to be an improvement over having a tyrant. I guess.)

As a side note, god damn the good guys killed a lot of redshirts in that scene. It's possible Elan hadn't really been killing people (as opposed to dungeon monsters) by the time he met Nale, but we're well past the point where Elan could reasonably claim to be opposed to killing on principle.

OOTS Still not over (spoilers)

"but I'm not a twin any more." I don't think Elan is saying "so I don't have to be all that good" as such, I think what he's saying is actually a bit more subtle than that. He's saying "there is no longer even the faintest hope of my biological family becoming intact again, because you destroyed that hope." Elan rescuing Nale back at the beginning was at least in part about the hope of redeeming Nale, inspiring him to turn good so they'd be brothers.

There are Star Wars references all over this part of the story. Presumably none of the characters actually know what Star Wars is, but they know stories, they know the shape of a story where a heroic son redeems his evil father. Elan is saying, here, "that's not the story I'm going to be a part of. I don't think you're worth it."

Which is, in fact, a pretty astonishing thing for Elan to say given the thing about the Snarl and the ongoing theme of conflict vs groups getting along. Apparently that basic theme is not incompatible with setting some boundaries. Which I think is appropriate. The group that Elan is a part of, after all, is the Order of the Stick, and Tarquin did just attempt to destroy the Order. Elan cannot have a good relationship with his team and also with the man trying to destroy his team.

Or we could just go a completely different route and say that there isn't good in Tarquin and Elan can't feel it. I mean, Luke trying to turn Vader was premised on the idea that the Force was telling him that it was possible. We know this is a story where sometimes characters don't experience redemption.

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Hey so house centipedes really creep me out but I also know they're really helpful and interesting creatures so can the centipede lovers on here reply with cool house centipede facts and pictures to help me get over my fear

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